Loot

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A recluse who has always wanted a certain object finds it after an earthquake, when the ocean disappears. But he and the other looters are drowned when the sea comes back. Once upon our time, there was an earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded since the invention of the Richter scale. Although earthquakes usually cause floods, this one did the reverse, drew back the ocean as a vast breath taken. The most secret level of our world lay revealed: the seabedded—wrecked ships, facades of houses, ballroom candelabra, toilet bowl, pirate chest, TV screen, mail coach, aircraft fuselage, cannon, marble torso, Kalashnikov, metal carapace of a tourist busload, baptismal font, automatic dishwasher, computer, swords sheathed in barnacles, coins turned to stone. The people who had fled from their toppling houses to the maritime hills ran down to loot the once-sunken objects. Time does not, never did, exist down here. Ordinary shop-looting, routine during the political uprisings, was no comparison. Orgiastic joy gave people strength to heave out of the sand what they did not know they wanted. They were able to forget the wreck of their houses and the loss of time-bound possessions there. Amid their shouts to one another, they did not hear the distant approach of the sea returning, according to interviews with survivors and witnesses. There’s a man who has wanted a certain object (what?) all his life. He has a lot of things—there’s an Art Nouveau lamp he reads by, and above his bed a Japanese print, a Hokusai, “The Great Wave”—but not the one. He’s a retired man, long divorced, who lives in an old villa in the hills. The sight from his lookout of what could never have happened is a kind of command. He joins the other looters, with whom he doesn’t mix, racing from object to object. But, unlike the others, he takes nothing—until: there, ornate with seaweed and shells, is the object. (A mirror?) He knew that that was where it was, beneath the sea, that’s why he didn’t know what it was, could never find it before. He is taking the object back with him when the great wave comes from behind. His name, well known in the former-regime circles in the capital, is not among those of the survivors. Along with him, among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the ancient pirates and fishermen, there are those dropped from planes during the dictatorship so that with the complicity of the sea they would never be found. Who recognized them, that day, where they lie? No carnation or rose floats.